The Disposable Man

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Ron Klesczewski drove with both hands on the wheel, his eyes intent on the twisting dirt road ahead.

“Do we know for sure this isn’t a dog or a dead deer or something?” Tyler asked from the backseat.

I twisted around to face him. “Not according to Sheila. She checked it out. It’s definitely a man.”

J.P. Tyler scowled silently into his lap. “A suicide, I bet,” he said glumly. The forensics expert of my four-member squad, he was along for good reason, but he’d been having a bad day and was obviously convincing himself the rest of it had just vanished down the tubes. I was counting on his natural curiosity to resurface once we reached our destination.

A sudden lurch made me turn back toward the road.

Ron smiled apologetically. “Sorry. Don’t guess this sees much traffic.”

He nervously drove us through a huge muddy hole, accelerating to make sure we didn’t get stranded in the middle. Trees to both sides of us canopied overhead, allowing only an ineffectual dappling of late summer sun. I checked their crowns in vain for the first faint blushings of the coming fall foliage, always first to appear in the high, colder hills surrounding downtown. We were off of Ames Hill Road, west of Brattleboro, an area as seemingly remote as Vermont’s deepest backwoods, and yet only fifteen minutes from the office. Half our department’s beat looked like this, yet we were perhaps the fifth largest community in the state.

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